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Exposure to phthalates during pregnancy can affect a newborn’s brain development, study finds
[url=https://www.gora142.ru/120624/zhk-bestvej-poslednie-novosti/]мальчик гей[/url]Phthalates — the synthetic chemicals used in everyday products for food packaging, personal care, toys and more — have been linked to abnormal neurological development in infants.
Now, scientists may have discovered a biological pathway for how this phenomenon could occur. Researchers found that in utero exposure to phthalates is linked with altered metabolism of neurotransmitters and amino acids involved in brain maturation, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications.
The report is the first to use untargeted metabolomics — the study of all small molecules or metabolites in a biological system — to connect a mother’s phthalate exposure to a newborn’s metabolites, and those metabolites to neurological development, said senior study author Dr. Donghai Liang via email.
“This represents an important step forward in understanding how prenatal chemical exposures shape infant development at the molecular level,” added Liang, an associate professor of environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta.First introduced in the 1920s, phthalates are used to make plastics softer and more flexible, primarily in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) products such as vinyl flooring, medical devices, children’s toys, food packaging or shower curtains. The chemicals also help lubricate substances and carry fragrances in various personal care products including deodorant; nail polish; perfumes; hair gels, sprays or shampoos; soaps; and body lotions.
Phthalates are also endocrine disruptors that have been linked to preterm birth, infant genital abnormalities, childhood obesity, asthma, cancer, cardiovascular issues, and low sperm count and testosterone in men.
“We conducted this study because phthalates are everywhere in our daily lives,” Liang said, hence their nickname “everywhere chemicals.”
Harming infant health
The findings are based on mother-newborn pairs enrolled in the Atlanta African American Maternal-Child Cohort between 2016 and 2018. In urine samples collected from 216 mothers between eight weeks and 14 weeks of gestation at visit one and 145 participants between 24 and 30 weeks’ gestation at visit two, the authors measured eight phthalate metabolites. Participants were around age 24 on average, and their levels of some phthalate metabolites were higher than the average determined by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.Within a day or two of birth, the authors collected the babies’ blood via a heel stick.
The team found prenatal phthalate levels were associated with lower levels of tyrosine, an amino acid and precursor to the thyroid hormone thyroxine. Thyroxine was also abnormally low in those with in utero phthalate exposure, and low thyroxine has been previously associated with greater vulnerability to illness and neurodevelopmental issues in newborns, the authors said. Tyrosine is also a precursor to the neurotransmitters dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine, all of which partly contribute to the body’s fight-or-flight response. Low levels of these neurotransmitters can lead to various problems, including anxiety, depression and trouble focusing.
Prenatal phthalate exposure was also linked with lower levels of the essential amino acid tryptophan, which converts into 5-hydroxytryptophan (or 5-HTP), which then turns into serotonin. Both 5-HTP and serotonin were also low. Serotonin has several critical roles in the body, including mood regulation, sleep, learning, memory, digestion and the body’s response to stress. Previous research has linked low serotonin with mood disorders such as depression and anxiety, sleep problems, and digestive issues.
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Arctic auroras
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For getting around during winter, the Inuit here nowadays prefer snowmobiles, although they still keep their sled dogs. During winter they’ll offer intrepid visitors, wrapped up warm against the deep-freeze temperatures, dog-sledding jaunts. These can last either an hour or be part of expeditions over several days, sometimes with the added experience of learning how to build an igloo. Sisimiut on the west coast and Tasilaq in the southeast are active winter centers for dog sledding.Winter’s most stellar attraction, though, is northern lights watching. With little urban light pollution, Greenland is a dark canvas for spectacular displays, and aurora borealis-watching vacations are becoming more popular.
Staying outdoors, Greenland is developing a reputation among adventure enthusiasts: from long-distance skiing expeditions and heliskiing on the icecap to hiking the 100-mile-long Arctic Circle Trail from Kangerslussuaq, where firearms need to be carried for warning shots in case of polar bear encounters.
Life is definitely changing here. The climate crisis is eating away at its icecap and Greenland may well end up as a pawn in a game of geopolitical chess. But for now, the bright glare of international attention should shine a favorable light on one of the wildest travel destinations on Earth.
Travel writer Mark Stratton is an Arctic specialist who has traveled to Greenland six times and counting. He’s marveled at the aurora borealis, sailed to Disko Island, dog-sledded with the Inuit, and once got stuck in an icefloe.
While the Cumberland sample may contain longer chains of fatty acids, SAM is not designed to detect them. But SAM’s ability to spot these larger molecules suggests it could detect similar chemical signatures of past life on Mars if they’re present, Williams said.
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“Curiosity is not a life detection mission,” Freissinet said. “Curiosity is a habitability detection mission to know if all the conditions were right … for life to evolve. Having these results, it’s really at the edge of the capabilities of Curiosity, and it’s even maybe better than what we had expected from this mission.”Before sending missions to Mars, scientists didn’t think organic molecules would be found on the red planet because of the intensity of radiation Mars has long endured, Glavin said.
Curiosity won’t return to Yellowknife Bay during its mission, but there are still pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample aboard. Next, the team wants to design a new experiment to see what it can detect. If the team can identify similar long-chain molecules, it would mark another step forward that might help researchers determine their origins, Freissinet said.“That’s the most precious sample we have on board … waiting for us to run the perfect experiment on it,” she said. “It holds secrets, and we need to decipher the secrets.”
Briony Horgan, coinvestigator on the Perseverance rover mission and professor of planetary science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, called the detection “a big win for the whole team.” Horgan was not involved the study.
“This detection really confirms our hopes that sediments laid down in ancient watery environments on Mars could preserve a treasure trove of organic molecules that can tell us about everything from prebiotic processes and pathways for the origin of life, to potential biosignatures from ancient organisms,” Horgan said.Dr. Ben K.D. Pearce, assistant professor in Purdue’s department of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences and leader of the Laboratory for Origins and Astrobiology Research, called the findings “arguably the most exciting organic detection to date on Mars.” Pearce did not participate in the research.
Everyone is talking about Greenland. Here’s what it’s like to visit
[url=https://cow-swop.org]cow swap[/url]A few months ago, Greenland was quietly getting on with winter, as the territory slid deeper into the darkness that envelops the world’s northerly reaches at this time of year.
But President Donald Trump’s musings about America taking over this island of 56,000 largely Inuit people, halfway between New York and Moscow, has seen Greenland shaken from its frozen Arctic anonymity.
Denmark, for whom Greenland is an autonomous crown dependency, has protested it’s not for sale. Officials in Greenland, meanwhile, have sought to assert the territory’s right to independence.
The conversation continues to intensify. A contentious March 28 visit to a US military installation by Usha Vance, the second lady, accompanied by her husband, Vice President JD Vance, was the latest in a series of events to focus attention on Trump’s ambitions for Greenland.
The visit was originally planned as a cultural exchange, but was shortened following complaints from Greenland Prime Minister Mute B. Egede.
Had the Vances prolonged their scheduled brief visit, they would’ve discovered a ruggedly pristine wildernesses steeped in rich Indigenous culture.
An inhospitable icecap several miles deep covers 80% of Greenland, forcing the Inuit to dwell along the shorelines in brightly painted communities. Here, they spend brutally cold winters hunting seals on ice under the northern lights in near perpetual darkness. Although these days, they can also rely on community stores.
The problem for travelers over the years has been getting to Greenland via time-consuming indirect flights. That’s changing. Late in 2024, the capital Nuuk opened a long-delayed international airport. From June 2025, United Airlines will be operating a twice-weekly direct service from Newark to Nuuk.
Two further international airports are due to open by 2026 — Qaqortoq in South Greenland and more significantly in Ilulissat, the island’s only real tourism hotspot.
Curiosity rover makes ‘arguably the most exciting organic detection to date on Mars’
[url=https://bangeeexchange.com]bungee exchange[/url]The NASA Curiosity rover has detected the largest organic molecules found to date on Mars, opening a window into the red planet’s past. The newly detected compounds suggest complex organic chemistry may have occurred in the planet’s past — the kind necessary for the origin of life, according to new research.
The organic compounds, which include decane, undecane and dodecane, came to light after the rover analyzed a pulverized 3.7 billion-year-old rock sample using its onboard mini lab called SAM, short for Sample Analysis at Mars.
Scientists believe the long chains of molecules could be fragments of fatty acids, which are organic molecules that are chemical building blocks of life on Earth and help form cell membranes. But such compounds can also be formed without the presence of life, created when water interacts with minerals in hydrothermal vents.
The molecules cannot currently be confirmed as evidence of past life on the red planet, but they add to the growing list of compounds that robotic explorers have discovered on Mars in recent years. A study detailing the findings was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The detection of the fragile molecules also encourages astrobiologists that if any biosignatures, or past signs of life, ever existed on Mars, they are likely still detectable despite the harsh solar radiation that has bombarded the planet for tens of millions of years.“Ancient life, if it happened on Mars, it would have released some complex and fragile molecules,” said lead study author Dr. Caroline Freissinet, research scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in the Laboratory for Atmospheres, Observations, and Space in Guyancourt, France. “And because now we know that Mars can preserve these complex and fragile molecules, it means that we could detect ancient life on Mars.”
A long time in the making
Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012. More than 12 years later, the rover has driven over 21 miles (34 kilometers) to ascend Mount Sharp, which is within the crater. The feature’s many layers preserve millions of years of geological history on Mars, showing how it shifted from a wet to a dry environment.
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Perhaps one of the most valuable samples Curiosity has gathered on its mission to understand whether Mars was ever habitable was collected in May 2013.The rover drilled the Cumberland sample from an area within a crater called Yellowknife Bay, which resembled an ancient lake bed. The rocks from Yellowknife Bay so intrigued Curiosity’s science team that it had the rover drive in the opposite direction to collect samples from the area before heading to Mount Sharp.
Since collecting the Cumberland sample, Curiosity has used SAM to study it in a variety of ways, revealing that Yellowknife Bay was once the site of an ancient lake where clay minerals formed in water. The mudstone created an environment that could concentrate and preserve organic molecules and trapped them inside the fine grains of the sedimentary rock.Freissinet helped lead a research team in 2015 that was able to identify organic molecules within the Cumberland sample.
The instrument detected an abundance of sulfur, which can be used to preserve organic molecules; nitrates, which are essential for plant and animal health on Earth; and methane composed of a type of carbon associated with biological processes on Earth.
“There is evidence that liquid water existed in Gale Crater for millions of years and probably much longer, which means there was enough time for life-forming chemistry to happen in these crater-lake environments on Mars,” said study coauthor Daniel Glavin, senior scientist for sample return at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.
‘For the public to enjoy’
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The museum’s history starts in 1998, when Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani opened a building to the public on his farm some 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of Qatari capital Doha.A distant relative of Qatar’s ruling family, founder and chairman of Al Faisal Holdings (one of Qatar’s biggest conglomerates), and a billionaire whose business acumen had him recognized as one of the most influential Arab businessmen in the world, Sheikh Faisal had already amassed a substantial private collection of historically important regional artifacts, plus a few quirky pieces of interest, allowing visitors an intimate look into Qatari life and history.
In an interview with Qatari channel Alrayyan TV in 2018, Sheikh Faisal said that the museum started as a hobby.
“I used to collect items whenever I got the chance,” he said. “As my business grew, so did my collections, and soon I was able to collect more and more items until I decided to put them in the museum for the public to enjoy.”
His private cabinet of curiosities has since evolved into a 130-acre complex. Through the fort-like entrance gate lies an oryx reserve, an impressive riding school and stables, a duck pond and a mosque built with a quirky leaning minaret. There’s now even a five-star Marriott hotel, two cafes and the Zoufa restaurant serving modern Lebanese cuisine.
Of course, there’s also the super-sized museum, with a recently-opened car collection housing everything from vintage Rolls-Royces to wartime Jeeps and colorful Buicks. Outside you’ll find peacocks roaming the grounds, and signs warning drivers to be aware of horses and ostriches.
Visitors to the FBQ museum are free to explore the grounds and can even enter the stables to pat the horses.
Iceberg flotillas
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Located on the west coast, Ilulissat is a pretty halibut- and prawn-fishing port on a dark rock bay where visitors can sit in pubs sipping craft beers chill-filtered by 100,000-year-old glacial ice.It’s a place to be awed by the UNESCO World Heritage Icefjord where Manhattan skyscraper-sized icebergs disgorge from Greenland’s icecap to float like ghostly ships in the surrounding Disko Bay.
Small boats take visitors out to sail closely among the bay’s magnificent iceberg flotilla. But not too close.
“I was on my boat once and saw one of these icebergs split in two. The pieces fell backwards into the sea and created a giant wave,” said David Karlsen, skipper of the pleasure-boat, Katak. “…I didn’t hang around.”
Disko Bay’s other giants are whales. From June to September breaching humpback whales join the likes of fin and minke whales feasting on plankton. Whale-watching is excellent all around Greenland’s craggy coastline.
Whales are eaten here. Visitors shouldn’t be surprised to encounter the traditional Greenlandic delicacy of mattak — whale-skin and blubber that when tasted is akin to chewing on rubber. Inuit communities have quotas to not only hunt the likes of narwhals but also polar bears, musk-ox and caribou — which can also appear on menus.
Curiosity has maintained pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample in a “doggy bag” so that the team could have the rover revisit it later, even miles away from the site where it was collected. The team developed and tested innovative methods in its lab on Earth before sending messages to the rover to try experiments on the sample.
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In a quest to see whether amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, existed in the sample, the team instructed the rover to heat up the sample twice within SAM’s oven. When it measured the mass of the molecules released during heating, there weren’t any amino acids, but they found something entirely unexpected.An intriguing detection
The team was surprised to detect small amounts of decane, undecane and dodecane, so it had to conduct a reverse experiment on Earth to determine whether these organic compounds were the remnants of the fatty acids undecanoic acid, dodecanoic acid and tridecanoic acid, respectively.The scientists mixed undecanoic acid into a clay similar to what exists on Mars and heated it up in a way that mimicked conditions within SAM’s oven. The undecanoic acid released decane, just like what Curiosity detected.
Each fatty acid remnant detected by Curiosity was made with a long chain of 11 to 13 carbon atoms. Previous molecules detected on Mars were smaller, meaning their atomic weight was less than the molecules found in the new study, and simpler.
“It’s notable that non-biological processes typically make shorter fatty acids, with less than 12 carbons,” said study coauthor Dr. Amy Williams, associate professor of geology at the University of Florida and assistant director of the Astraeus Space Institute, in an email. “Larger and more complex molecules are likely what are required for an origin of life, if it ever occurred on Mars.”
